As Sharon outlined in her great post last week, we have completed our first round of user testing on Ushahidi V3. We tested key interactions on pages from the Pattern Library with users of varying levels of Ushahidi experience.

Ushahidi team members recently provided blogger training and deployment consultation for the Txeka-la initiative monitoring the Mozambique general election and engaging community through mapping. From the Canadian High Commission YouTube post:

We are excited to announce yet another bug fix release of the Ushahidi platform dubbed 2.7.4. We knocked out a couple of bugs with this release, including password validation errors, runtime errors in settings and when submitting reports, cached theme settings issues, 2MB file upload limit and much more.

I’ve been on and off the road since the end of June, it’s nearing the end of July, I’m not going to lie, the adventure has been unbelievably amazing, but I am excited for a hot water shower and the comfort of my own bed! The past two weeks have been a whirlwind. I’ve been in seven different airports, six different countries, and three different continents.

Upgrade day is here once again. The 4th community wide Upgrade day is set September 25th – 26th 2013, to help you get your deployment running on an older version of Ushahidi up to date with the Bamako bug fix release.

[Guest post by Jean Brice in English and French. He is preparing for the upcoming Cameroon Elections. Jean Brice previously joined the Uchaguzi Kenyan Elections team to learn how to do a full Ushahidi program]
(English to follow)

Bugs Fixes, not the mosquito kind, are on our mind. Team Ninja has been hacking away to do a major bug fix for Ushahidi platform. We need your help to test before the next release. Also in the weekly, some upcoming events from ihub Research and the International Conference of Crisismappers plus a Deployment of the Week from Sudan.

[Guest Post by Maria Grabowski. Maria Grabowski holds a M.Sc. in social anthropology from the University of Copenhagen. Based on fieldwork in Cairo and Nairobi, her Master Thesis from 2013 explores Ushahidi through an anthropological take on social movements, digital activism and hope.

[Guest Post by Jaroslav Valuch, Head of Campaign against Racism and Hatecrimes at Agency for Social Inclusion, The Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, Field Coordinator with the Ushahidi Haiti project, co-founder of the Standby Task Force and Ushahidi community leader. Jaro coordinated the Krizova Mapa Ceska for the 2013 Floods.]

In the global babelfish, maps and data activate the potential for human sense-making across borders and knowledge with any device. SMS, email, social media and sensors make it possible to collect knowledge, tell a different story or capture news tips or even sentiment.